Salem

It would be great to get a better understanding of how the purity caps by proficiencies play out in the game

From the patch announcement:

Natural Alchemy: Fish, Herbs, Animals, Dug Clay, Quarried Stones and Water have slight, natural alchemical properties, varying over different areas in ways that are individual to each type of animal, herb, fish or mineral. I.e. Waxing Toadstools have a "alchemy field" of their own, different from the field affecting Lavender Blewits, and Beavers have a field different from that used for Deer.

Proficiencies and Alchemy: The alchemical purity of an item your character acquires from the wild is capped by his proficiency values.

Frontier & Wilderness caps Fish
Hunting & Gathering caps Foraged herbs
Mines & Mountains caps Quarried stone and foraged minerals
Pots & Pans caps Dug-out, natural clay.

The first part quoted indicates that picking up the same type of item (say, a waxing toadstool) within the same general area should produce an item with almost the same alchemy properties. This is easy to test especially with autumn grass in tight packed areas - and that is definitely true.

The second part is also easy to test with two characters, each one in the same area with different proficiencies according to what you are sampling. Just need to make sure both characters are in the same exact location and the items sampled are as close together as possible.

So I tested this between my main and my alt:

Newb Alt with Hunting & Gathering of 5 picking up a Waxing Toadstool:


Main char with H&G of 27 picking up another Waxing Toadstool a few tiles away:


Next my newb alt with H&G of 5 finds a Chestnut:


And my main with H&G of 27 conveniently finds another chestnut nearby:


****************************************************************************************************

Curious results of lime boulder testing:

I found a patch of lime and someone already dug up a boulder.

My main char with Mines & Mountains of 26 took a bite off of it, andhen my newb alt with M&M of only 5 took a second bite. They were identical properties.

Maybe it has something to do with the M&M skill when you dig up the boulder, so we are getting the result due to the M&M skill of whoever originally dug the boulder? I had my main dig up a new boulder to explore this and had both characters chip off a piece. They were again identical to eachother, and extremely similar to the original samples - which could easily be explained by the fact that I probably did not dig the boulder from the exact same spot as the original guy. Its possible though that the original guy had the same M&M as my character of course... Will require further testing.

I raised my alt's H&G to 10 and did another sampling - this time autumn grass:


correction: should say H&G 27 on my comprison, not 26

Hmm, interesting. Raising it up to 10 didn't seem to help as much as I expected - as if no effect? Im waiting for chestnut/waxing toadstool to spawn in same area of my previous samples for more data

There is some randomness to this. If you pick 100 items with noob and 100 with vet, then you can conclude.

Good data collection, question is how far between pick ups, as you could have just picked up from your second character much closer to a "node center".

Darkside is a leader of exploring the new system .

dageir wrote:There is some randomness to this. If you pick 100 items with noob and 100 with vet, then you can conclude.

I do not believe there is any randomness to it. My reasoning is if you take several buckets and sample the exact same little seciton of water you will get several buckets of exactly identical alchemy water. The only deviation I will have with this foraged item data collection is that it is extremely hard to sample the same item from the same tile, as the greater the distance the greater the deviation.

Here is an interesitng example of why I believe randomness is not part of it.

I took the two characters just outside Boston and picked an area of grasses - not close together as I would like but close enough for this exercise.

I then mixed up who picked up what grass, and compared the results.

The results clearly show a correlation in the higher purity my character with higher proficiencies has compared to the character with lower ones.



The correlations between the samples based on H&G value become extremely clear when you plot them on a graph:



I know its kind of odd to put H&G value on the same lines but it was the best way I can think of to demonstrate the differences. But you'll see that the sample values are so similar that the two lines for the H&G 27 samples are right on top of eachother and look the same, while the 3 from H&G 10 also are right on top of eachother almost becoming one line with clear distinction in the values of mercury and lead.

It becomes quite apparent looking at the graph that the max purity of the item picked is modified towards average (25) by your H&G skill, so my higher H&G character picks with mercury around 33.5 while the lower H&G value has his mercury values take an even bigger hit towards average to 29.5. To compensate the higher mercury the item's natural lead was lower than average and again depending on your H&G affects how much towards average it reverted to.

Just like to say thanks to Darkside for all his efforts and for sharing the info with the community, personally my maths is appalling, so stuff like this is very useful.
Cheers mate !

One possible way to eliminate as many variables as possible and clean up the math a bit would be to have one character at 10 h+g and the other with say 20, 30, really any even number which is a multiple of 10.

Then map out a purity node. Use the high character to forage the same item until something changed in value, drop a campfire there, change directions until you have a north south west and east boundary campfire. Forage as many of the same items from this area with the 10 character and then forage the same number with the other. Ideally the number would be 100, but a lesser multiple of 10 would be okay too.

Add up the purity of all items on the 10 alt and then average them. Do the same with the higher alt.

10 alt: purity / Number of times = x

Higher char: purity / Number of times = y

Y- X = Z / (difference between alts) = a rough idea of how each number of proficiency effects your purity output.



Then you would want to increase you main char's h&g 10 points and repeat the process to see if there is exponential growth or dismissing returns. Then you could take your results and graph them a little cleaner.

^
|
30
20
10
H&G
Purity 0, .25, .5, .75-->

Adding in elements would complicate the process only slightly



This is off the top of my head, I could be missing something crucial here.

To nit pick a bit: The location of the item foraged is randomly determined?
How high the values will be for picking one single item might still have a random factor to it.
Water is fixed and will be the same no matter who collects it, right?

Except water isn't capped, and from a couple of reports, reaches better than 70% purity (forgot the element posted and numbers), and may possibly even reach 1.0 purity. (In theory... probability of it hitting this? <shrug>)